Texas Rangers and forensic teams dig up Plainview grave

By HOMER MARQUEZ hmarquez@hearstnp.com

Published 11:15 am, Friday, February 6, 2015

Photo: By Homer Marquez/Plainview Herald

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Dr. Harrell Gill-King (left) director of the laboratory of forensic anthropology and human identification at the University of North Texas exhume a body from a grave Friday morning in the efforts of identifying a 30-year-old murder case in Plainview. less

Dr. Harrell Gill-King (left) director of the laboratory of forensic anthropology and human identification at the University of North Texas exhume a body from a grave Friday morning in the efforts of identifying ... more

Photo: By Homer Marquez/Plainview Herald

Texas Rangers and forensic teams dig up Plainview grave

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In a grave marked simply “Jane Doe,” forensics teams and Texas Rangers sifted through a coffin of bones Friday morning in the efforts of finding more answers to a 30-year-old cold case murder.

“This is definitely a female skull,” said Dr. Harrell Gill-King, the director of the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology and Human Identification Department at the University of North Texas, as he sat in a grave at the Plainview Cemetery and examined the skull of a woman believed to have been killed by the drifting serial killer Henry Lee Lucas before 1982.

On Feb. 16, 1982, Hale County Sheriff’s Department investigated the murder of a white female who was found nude and headless northeast of Plainview. Described as a petite woman in her late teens or early 20s, the body was found badly decomposed with her hands tied behind her back with a bra.

Several days later, a human skull was found in the desert area near Scottsdale, Arizona.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Ralph Erdmann of Childress concluded that the head found in Arizona did belong to the body found in Plainview.

Police attempted to find the identity of the woman, as they tried to connect the deceased body with cases of missing women in the state. Theories formed that the body may have belonged to an exotic dancer from Abilene; however, dental records would dispel that rumor. The headless woman would never be identified.

After being arrested, Lucas confessed to a slew of murders including the Dec. 19, 1982, stabbing death of Petersburg widow Glenna Fay Biggers. A Hale County grand jury also indicted Lucas on murder charges involving the unidentified woman. Lucas was indicted after he sketched the victim’s face and gave a voluntary statement admitting to the murder. The sketch was very similar to a photograph of a reconstructed skull believed to be a part of the victim’s body that was found in Plainview.

At that time, Lucas was also charged with the murder of his 15-year-old common-law wife in Jacksonville, Florida., as well as to the murder of Katie Rich, 80, of Ringold. Lucas claimed to have killed about 100 women, many of them hitchhikers, in Texas and 15 other states.

On Feb. 24, 1985, Lucas received a life sentence for the murder of Biggers. In return for Lucas’ guilty plea in the Biggers case, District Attorney Ron Felty dropped an indictment against Lucas for the murder of the unidentified woman.

During the trial, appointed defense attorney Charles White noted for the record that Lucas denied the headless corpse murder. Felty said after the meeting, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s cleared. I think Lucas did it.”

However, as the years passed, controversy began to cloud the Lucas murders as journalists and authorities questioned Lucas’ capability to be at all those killing scenes. On top of that, in 1992 Erdmann, the pathologist who linked the head with the body, was convicted on several counts of evidence tampering and perjury, including the falsifying of an autopsy.

So in a full circle, the story returned to the grave marked “Jane Doe.”

“We discovered this case while we were reviewing another case,” said Texas Ranger Tony Arnold as he watched the exhumation of the grave. “There are some things we wanted to verify.”

Though Arnold did not say what case they were reviewing, sources speculate that family members of Biggers are questioning if Lucas even killed the Petersburg woman.

Regardless of the speculation, Arnold said identifying the woman is part of a nationwide initiative started in 2007 to identify missing people. The initiative is helping to bring closure to families across the country.

“That’s not for us to determine right now. Right now we want to get her identified because there’s 40,000 unidentified missing people in the U.S. Somebody’s looking for her and we can see if we can find her,” said Arnold.

Arnold said the University of North Texas has a human identification laboratory that is going to take body's DNA and put it in a national data base in an attempt to match it with someone else like a family member.

“It’s a process,” said Arnold.

On Friday, King and his associates carefully removed dirt around a baby casket holding the woman’s bones. The woman laid in a morgue for about a year before her remains were placed in a small casket and buried. In the casket were plastic bags of bones marked with the corresponding bone inside.

“By these markings you can tell she was in her late teens early 20s,” said King as he examined a bone. Also accompanying the bones was the skull found in Arizona.

King said by collecting the DNA of the bones, they will be able to determine without a doubt if the skull matches the body. The DNA information will also be placed in a national database.

“We’ll submit DNA samples on the head and DNA samples on the post-cranial, and if they’re the same they’ll hit each other in the data base,” said King. “If they don’t match, we’ll know. The real problem here is that the examination of these remains were done by an individual that was discredited.

“The reason we’re doing this examination has to do with the fact that there is still a lot of questions hanging over this because of that.”

King said they will take the bones back to Denton to be examined at their laboratory.